He made that hissing Fae sound of distaste. But he eased away and stood straight.

“Be a good little fairy,” I purred, “and go get V’lane for me.” I hesitated, weighing my next words. “Tell him I have some news about the Sinsar Dubh.”

Laughter and all voices died; the club fell silent.

Movement ceased.

I glanced around, absorbing it. It was as if the entire place had been freeze-framed by the mere mention of the Sinsar Dubh.

Though the club was a bubble frozen in time, I swore I felt eyes resting heavily on me. Was there some kind of charm cast over this place so that if someone uttered the name of the king’s forbidden Book, everyone but the person who’d spoken the words and the person who’d laid the spell would momentarily freeze?

I scanned the sub-clubs.

Air hissed between my teeth. Two tiered dance floors down, a man in an impeccable white suit was holding frozen court in a kingly white chair, surrounded by dozens of white-clad attendants.

I hadn’t seen him since that night long ago, when Barrons and I had searched Casa Blanc. But, like me, he wasn’t frozen.

McCabe nodded to me across the sea of statues.

Just as suddenly as everything had frozen, life resumed.

“You have offended me, human,” the golden god was saying, “and I will kill you for the slight. Not here. Not tonight. But soon.”

“Sure, whatever,” I muttered. “Just get him here.” I turned away and began shoving my way through the crowd, but by the time I reached the kingly white chair, McCabe was gone.

I had to pass the sub-club where the dreamy-eyed guy tended bar to get to the stairs. “Directly,” construed as a geographical command, didn’t preclude stopping along the way and, since I was parched and had a few questions about a tarot card, I rapped my knuckles on the counter for a shot.

I could barely remember what it felt like to mix drinks and party with my friends, jam-packed with ignorance and shiny dreams.

Five stools down, a top hat gauzed with cobwebs was a dark, unused chimney badly in need of sweeping. Strawlike hair swept shoulders that were as bony as broomsticks in a pin-striped suit. The fear dorcha was hanging with the dreamy-eyed guy again. Creepy.

Nobody was sitting next to it. The top hat rotated my way as I took a seat, four empty stools away. A deck of tarot cards was artfully arranged in its suit pocket, a natty handkerchief, cards fanned. Knobbed ankles crossed, displaying patent-leather shoes with shiny, pointy toes.

“Weight of the world on your shoulders?” it called like a carny selling chances at a booth.

I stared into the swirling dark tornado beneath the brim of the top hat. Fragments of a face—half a green eye and brow, part of a nose—appeared and vanished like scraps of pictures torn from a magazine, momentarilyslapped up against a window, then torn off by the next storm gust. I suddenly knew the debonair and eerie prop was as ancient as the Fae themselves. Did the fear dorcha make the hat, or did the hat make the fear dorcha?

Because my parents raised me to be polite and old habits die hard, it was difficult to hold my tongue. But the mistake of speaking to it was not one I’d make twice.

“Relationships got you down?” it cried, with the inflated exuberance of an OxiClean commercial. I half-expected helpful visual aids to manifest in midair as he hawked his wares—whatever they were.

I rolled my eyes. One could certainly say that.

“Might be just what you need is a night on the town!” it enthused in a too-bright voice.

I snorted.

It unfolded itself from the stool, proffering long bony arms and skeletal hands. “Give us a dance, luv. I’m told I’m quite the Fred Astaire.” It tapped out a quick step and bent low at the waist, thin arms flamboyantly wide.

A shot of whiskey slid down the counter. I tossed it back swiftly.

“See you learned your lesson, beautiful girl.”

“Been learning a lot lately.”

“All ears.”

“Tarot deck was my life. How’s that?”

“Told you. Prophecies. All shapes.”

“Why’d you give me THE WORLD?”

“Didn’t. Would you like me to?”

“You flirting with me?”

“If I was?”

“Might run screaming.”

“Smart girl.”

We laughed.

“Seen Christian lately?”

“Yes.”

His hands stilled on the bottles and he waited.

“Think he’s turning into something.”

“All things change.”

“Think he’s becoming Unseelie.”

“Fae. Like starfish, beautiful girl.”

“How’s that?”

“Grow back missing parts.”

“What are you saying?”

“Balance. World lists toward it.”

“Thought it was entropy.”

“Implies innate idiocy. People are. Universes aren’t.”

“So if an Unseelie Prince dies, someone will eventually replace it? If not a Fae, a human?”

“Hear princesses are dead, too.”

I gagged. Would human women be changed by eating Unseelie and end up becoming them in time? What else would the Fae steal from my world? Well, er, actually, what would I and my—I changed the subject swiftly. “Who gave me the card?”

He jerked a thumb at the fear dorcha.

I didn’t believe that for a minute. “What am I supposed to get from it?”